Wordle
The archive has not found a surviving copy.
2021·Short-form and streams·skill
The one-puzzle-a-day game whose spoiler-free emoji grid took over every timeline in the world at once.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2021
- Began as
- Something you played
- Where it started
- web
- Made by
- Josh Wardle, a Welsh engineer, for his partner Palak Shah
- Original title
- The name is a pun on his surname
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
Six guesses at a five-letter word. Green squares for right letter, right place; yellow for right letter, wrong place. Everybody in the world gets the same word each day and there is exactly one puzzle, so there is nothing to grind and nothing to buy. Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer, built it for his partner and released it publicly in October 2021.
The New York Times bought it in January 2022 for a low seven-figure sum and kept it free. It was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 alone, spawned an entire genre of daily one-shot browser puzzles, and made "a Wordle for X" a recognised product pitch.
Why it matteredWhat changed
A word game one man made for his partner went from ninety players to two million in ten weeks.
TimelineIn order
- Made
Wardle begins a prototype, and sets it aside the following year.1
- Posted
The game is released to the public.1
- Later
Ninety people play.1
- Took off
More than 300,000 play. A week later the figure is over two million.1
- Mainstream
The New York Times Company buys it, for a price in the low seven figures.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asThe Wordle app in the app stores was his.
ActuallyThat was an unrelated game released five years earlier. It was downloaded 200,000 times by mistake in January 2022, and its maker and Wardle gave fifty thousand dollars to charity.1
How it spreadFrom one place to everywhere
- The grid of emoji squares for sharing a result came from a group of friends in New Zealand.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on web.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things